Carla Busuttil

Gallery News for Carla Busuttil

Carla Busuttil in Milan

The Workbench gallery presents Carla Busuttil’s first solo exhibition in Milan, Italy from 8 to 31 July. Titled Polish your Speech, Polish your Teeth, the exhibition is curated by Pietro Di Lecce and includes works on paper accompanied by a film. The video The Tooth Colony concerns the bizarre crossroads of culture and identity and was shot while artist-in-residence on a farm in South Africa.

Carla Busuttil on Tutti Frutti in London

Carla Busuttil exhibits on the exhibition Tutti Frutti at Turps Gallery, London from 24 April. The inaugural show of the new Turps Gallery in South London will take place in collaboration with Marcus Harvey, director/editor of Turps Banana Magazine and Turps Art School. The gallery has put together a mixed painting show which aims to reflect the diversity of contemporary painting in London at the moment.

Carla Busuttil in London

The paintings of Carla Busuttil will be exhibited in the group show Figuratively Speaking at Heike Moras Art in London from 15 January to 11 February 2015. The exhibition is made up of artworks by a group of largely London-based artists who use the human body as their inspiration and playing field. Employing a more gestural or expressionistic style, the artists depict the human form using diverse approaches that question embodiment in our current post-Internet age. Busuttil will be one of the artists in conversation with Sacha Craddock on 29 January 2015.

Goodman Gallery at SP-Arte in Sao Paulo

For this year’s SP-Arte due to take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, from 9 to 12 April the Goodman Gallery has the singular distinction of being the sole representative of the African continent among the galleries from 17 countries. The Goodman Gallery will present historically significant works of a contemporary nature by senior artists, as well as distinctive works by new visionaries. International artists represented by Goodman Gallery will present work within the South African context or works that reference the broader African experience. The booth brings together Carla Busuttil, Kudzanai Chiurai, Kendell Geers, Alfredo Jaar, William Kentridge, Liza Lou, Mishek Masamvu, Mikhael Subotzky, Hank Willis Thomas, and Jeremy Wafer.

Goodman at Cape Town Art Fair 2015

For the Cape Town Art Fair 2015 the Goodman Gallery presents works by dynamic and young artists that deal with concepts and themes specific to their time and place. Themes like dislocation after apartheid, violence, insider and outsider statuses and multiple identities. In this time of global conflicts we find artists negotiating the contemporary moment which includes navigating post national identities, the complexities of Diaspora and, in our context, Afropessimism. Artists shown on the Goodman Gallery booth include Carla Busuttil, Kudzanai Chiurai, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Jabulani Dhlamini, Hasan and Husain Essop, Gabrielle Goliath, Gerald Machona, Haroon Gunn-Salie, Mikhael Subotzky, and JessicaWebster.

Carla Busuttil - a painter of tomorrow

Artbook publisher thames & Hudson has included painter Carla Busuttil in 100 Painters of Tomorrow due to be launched on September 22. The chosen artists were selected from more than 4300 entrants, come from over 37 countries and the entries were judged by an international panel of prominent painters and curators including Cecily Brown,curators Tony Godfrey, Yuko Hasegawa and Gregor Muir, and writer-critics Suzanne Hudson, Barry Schwabsky and Philip Tinari.The book will be launched at Christies in London on October 30. Busuttil also has a solo exhibition titled A Change of Tongue opening at Space K in Seoul on September 25.

Solo exhibitions

Goodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by South African-born and UK-based artist Carla Busuttil. In her first exhibition in Cape Town, titled Post-National Bliss, the artist imagines and explores the rituals and conflicts of a fictional world perpetually on the brink of chaos.

Busuttil writes: “This world is flat, and its inhabitants are a generation lost: unhinged aristocrats, powerless lawmen, scoundrel children, otherworldly victims – all lurching towards some unrecorded fate. It is a time after history. Left in the wake of this carnival of unseen faces lies a dystopian vacuum consumed by superstition and fervour. This imagined future (or alternative present) is a world derived from history but extrapolated to an exaggerated end.”

In Busuttil’s vivid and unsettling canvases and watercolors, figures and images from the edges of historical and current events are edited, divorced from prior context and re-imagined in a different world where new histories are allowed to emerge. In an accompanying video piece, titled No More History, figures from this world recur and jostle for attention. The mask appears as a motif throughout the exhibition, acting alternately as a disguise, a symbol of identification, and an object that bestows power, and freedom.

Carla Busuttil was born in 1982 in Johannesburg, and lives and works in Oxford in the UK. Her work has been featured on numerous group exhibitions around the world, including Newspeak: British Art Now at the Saatchi Gallery, London and Saatchi Adelaide, and she has held several solo shows in the UK. Busuttil will begin a residency at the NIROX Foundation in November. Post-National Bliss is her second solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery.

Exhibition opens Saturday 2 November at 11H00Public walkabout with the artist Wednesday 6 November at 11H00

Berlin-based and South African born painter Carla Busuttil will present her first major solo show in her home country at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg. Fast establishing herself in Europe and the United States, Busuttil has gained attention through her bold use of colour and brushstroke, depicting curious figures that embody and fuse manifold histories of conflict. In Exit Mode, she returns home to exhibit a series of paintings that traverse her exit from the country, and what she discovered when she left.

A dedicated painter, Busuttil’s point of departure and ultimate concern is always her medium. “Within my work, it is the quality of painting that matters,” she explains. “Content is secondary – always secondary. I am not interested in constructing images that shock or dictate, and doubt whether painting, or any other medium, retains the power to do so.” For the artist, it is not only the medium of paint that is crucial, but the hue that it manifests – and the essential poignancy of this manifestation. Singular and outlandish characters, each one defined by its ascribed palette, inhabit her canvases. “Colour plays an important role in both the process and outcome of my work. Colour guides emotional response – it can bind a painting. As with Matisse’s use of single-hued blocks, I find colour a superior stand-in for detail. And this is how my figures develop.”

At the same time, Busuttil admits that external references are unavoidable, quoting Candice Breitz: “If we consume something, we have to shit it out”. Busuttil expands on this by saying “and to shit, we must consume. So, content there must be.” While she works with photographic sources commonly found in library archives or newspapers and magazines, Busuttil explains that she merges “features from a number of photos (possibly spanning both era and geography) in order to construct a single painting, or single character. And, despite this collection of sourced material, the final canvas seldom resembles the photographs used. The result is more a process of working towards a strong painting, constantly degrading the weight of the foundation imagery. That movement towards a final image is driven emotionally, rather than intellectually. Colour and brushstrokes pull towards the desired result.”

On the surface, Busuttil’s paintings may appear as confrontations of contemporary politics, yet this is not her binding intention, but rather something more intuitive. “In many cases, the images I choose are those of recent war or conflict. For some reason, I find it easy look at images of violence. Perhaps most people do. It is just not easy to admit. Having said that, anything from Victorian clergy to modern day sportsmen could catch my attention. I choose images through instinctual immediacy, composition and feeling – without pre-intended message or meaning. I do not commentate, or intend to commentate. Yet, the themes of violence and power seem to regularly surface.” She continues to explain that “this process of source-gathering can result in my playing games with the underlying imagery – like some visual strand of ‘God Monopoly Charades’; placing seemingly non-connected historical events and figures alongside one another and seeing what kind of dialogue results. I think, if we draw a line through diverse histories, we could find commonalities – something that reveals a bit more about what it is to be human.”

While the title of the show – Exit Mode – stems from a conversation about immigration, Busuttil explains that it has an open interpretation. “This broad potential application, its ambiguity, is what I like about it. For example, in the context of American foreign policy, it could stem from the desire to extract forces from operations in Afghanistan and Iraq – operations for which strong arguments had previously been put forward. Or, within a failing relationship, it could describe the state of mind of the partner with the ‘itchiest feet’… Exit Mode can be applied universally and operates like an instinctual switch – a defence mechanism that clouds thought, destroys objectivity and slays optimism.” At the same time, in reference to her leaving South Africa, Busuttil questions: “Did I experience a kind of Exit Mode?”

Carla Busuttil was born in 1982 in Johannesburg and lives and works in Berlin. Busuttil received a BA (Hons.) in Fine Art at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, followed by her Masters in painting at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2005-2008). As well having work featured on Newspeak: British Art Now, at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2010), and Saatchi Adelaide (2011), Busuttil’s paintings have been seen on various group exhibitions and fairs in Europe, the United States and Asia. She has won numerous awards including the Jerwood Contemporary Painters Prize 2009 and the Deutsche Bank Award 2008. She has held solo shows in London at Gimpel Fils (2009) and Josh Lilley Gallery (2011).

Edge of Silence is a group show featuring artwork by some of Goodman Gallery’s leading contemporary artists.

The title is taken from a light box with transparency created by Alfredo Jaar that illuminates the words ‘OTHER PEOPLE THINK’, a quote from the youthful writings of John Cage in which Cage “affirms silence as an opportunity to learn what other people think.” Jaar’s light box follows this practice with a kind of silence opens up a space for listening by disrupting our thoughts and perceptions, inviting us to step outside ourselves.

Sleeping, a recurring motif in Kentridge’s work, is used as a metaphor for a state of self-imposed blissful ignorance in which the outside world may be forgotten as the sleeper closes herself off into her internal world. This notion, coupled with the fragility and transparency of glass, evokes a dangerous situation leading to a painful, if not actually destructive, moment of awakening and recognition in Kentridge’s series of prints Sleeping on Glass.

Liza Lou’s Untitled bead canvases emphasize repetition, formal perfection, and materiality, but thrives on the tension between silent beauty and the presence of traces of bodily residue in the beaded strips that establishes many of the social themes, such as uncelebrated women’s work, that underpin her work.

Works on exhibition reference cultural moments and artistic practice that is at times interrogative, celebratory, or a means of bearing witness. Yet in all instances they complicate and remediate so as to bring about a new framework for understanding or experiencing that which exists already.

Goodman Gallery Johannesburg welcomes you to 2012 with Advance/… Notice, an exhibition of new works by a dynamic group of contemporary artists from around the world. As we advance into a new calendar year, this exhibition gives notice of innovations from some of our artists who are already familiar to you, and of our new ventures into an intellectual exchange with artists with whom we are excited to work for the first time. This show will also give audiences a preview of what is to come, as many of the featured artists have solo shows planned for 2012 at Goodman Gallery spaces and other prestigious South African institutions.
Advance/… Notice introduces newly perfected techniques or processes for some of our well-known artists, such as platinum photographic prints by David Goldblatt, and a completely new turn of direction and field of interest for African American artist Hank Willis Thomas, who first exhibited with us on In Context in 2010, as well as for Sigalit Landau, the acclaimed Israeli artist we co-hosted at last year’s Venice Biennale. These international savants are joined by South African artists such as Hasan and Husain Essop, Moshekwa Langa, Mikhael Subotzky, Sue Williamson, William Kentridge, Rosenclaire, and Frances Goodman revealing either brand new works, or works not yet seen in Johannesburg. Also featured are works by Kendell Geers, whose retrospective exhibition will open at IZIKO South African National Gallery in late March 2012.
Our first show of the year seems an apt time to introduce the novel and the unexpected in the work of a number of artists and to also welcome prominent figures including Liza Lou, a world-renowned American now living and working in KwaZulu Natal; South African Candice Breitz, now resident in Berlin; Chilean-born New Yorker Alfredo Jaar; London-based Iranian Reza Aramesh, as well as Carla Busuttil – a young South African artist based in Berlin who is well-established in the United Kingdom, but has never before exhibited in her home country.
Liza Lou presents a work titled Gather Forty, one of a series of forty individual sculptures made from gold-plated beads that have been expertly threaded onto four hundred individual pieces of stainless steel wire and bound in a sheaf – continuing the shift of the beadwork medium from craft to conceptual art. Alfredo Jaar, internationally recognised artist, filmmaker and architect, celebrated for the public interventions he has created all over the world, shows From Time to Time, a panel of nine Time magazine covers focusing on Africa that either feature animals or malnourished Africans – revealing how the rest of the world often encapsulates its second largest continent. Breitz, who opens a major survey of her work titled Extra! at the Standard Bank Gallery this February, presents The Character, a video installation filmed in Mumbai that seeks to understand the role and influence of child characters in mainstream Indian cinema through interviews with a group of young moviegoers. In Action 78, Aramesh uses familiar scenes from news footage of the first Gulf War to restage, re-present and destabilise any easy readings of the conflicts we think we understand. Oil paintings by Busuttil offer a sinisterly-executed perusal of the exploitation of power and cruelty.
We are also very pleased to present for the first time the work of Nelisiwe Xaba, who will be presenting an interactive dance and video collaboration with Mocke J van Veuren at Goodman Gallery Projects in February. The crossover into visual art is exciting new territory for this renowned performer/dancer.
Goodman Gallery hopes you will join us to be inspired, challenged and excited by this exhibition and its promise of advances in the visual arts of South Africa. We trust you will find the exhibition gives notice of an innovative and exciting programme for 2012 in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Carla Busuttil was born 1982 in Johannesburg, South Africa and lives and works in Oxford, UK. Busuttil studied a Masters in painting at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2005-2008). She featured in Newspeak: British Art Now, at the Saatchi Gallery, London and Jerwood Contemporary Painting Prize, Jerwood Space, London, 2009. She has held numerous solo shows at spaces including Gimpel Fils, London and Josh Lilley Gallery, London as well as Goodman Gallery Johannesburg and Cape Town. Her work is included in the Saatchi Gallery collection, the Kabin Collection, London and the Franks-Suss Collection, London. Busuttil features in the recent publications 100 Painters of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson), Painting Now (Thames & Hudson) and Picturing People (Thames & Hudson).